14 DAY TRIAL // SuperTuxKart, a free 3D kart racing game, with many tracks, characters, and items for gamers, has been around for a very long time and now its developers are working to improve the graphical engine.
There was a time when the most interesting game that you could find on a Linux distribution was SuperTuxKart. It wasn't anything to look for, but it was something to pass the time. The latest version release is 0.8.1 and this should give you an idea about how old this game actually is.
The game development of SuperTuxKart didn't stay still during all this time. Even if the updates were mostly about the gameplay, the developer did implement some new features and other interesting effects over time. If you were to compare today's version with something that was done five years ago, you would find that the present release looks a lot better.
SuperTuxKart doesn't have a huge development team and piles of money waiting around uncollected. This is a game done by fans, so asking the developers to waste copious amounts of time on a new engine seem a little selfish.
Nonetheless, the SuperTuxKart dev team noticed that users had been complaining about the fact that the engine was lagging behind the times and they decided that an overhaul was in order.
“Out GSoC 2013 student Lauri Kasanen started to improve Irrlicht, which is a third-party open source rendering engine we have been using since STK 0.7. He added support for shaders, and a lot of additional features to be used by track designers (any regular reader of this blog should be aware of his very interesting blog posts during his development, see our blog posts around July and August 2013). After GSoC 2013 Vincent LeJeune took up the torch and started to write a new engine to allow new effects and more complex tracks.”
“To really enjoy STK in its new and shiny glory, a reasonable powerful graphics card will be needed. For all existing users with not exactly latest computer models at hand, don't be afraid: we will still support low end graphics card, but you will have to make some compromises,” said the developers in their blog post.
The team still has a long way to go before they can get all the pieces in place. The tracks need to be reworked and a few other aspects have to be improved. A precise release date for the improvements hasn't been provided, but it can't be too long now.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements. Also, you can download SuperTuxKart 0.8.1 right now from Softpedia to see how it currently looks.
